Liber CCCXLIII: AMRITA
Some Comments on the Elixir of Life

Extracted from the Magical Record of the Beast 666 for the year 1920 e.v.
By Aloster Kerval (Aleister Crowley)

7 June 1:55 a.m.

I feel inspired to jot down a few notes upon the
Elixir of Life.

The Elixir of Life by the Master Therion

The conditions of life are that the organism should
be able to adjust itself continually to its environment.
Any individual, to do this for long, needs either very
great intelligence or very great luck. His chief physical
asset is elasticity, the power of compensation and
recuperation. Our bodies are some 75% pure water; we are
a mere sponge, our strength arises from the great
mechanical ingenuity of our structure. But we are not
‘solid bodies’ like most inanimate beings. This water, by
kidneys, lungs, and skin, constantly cleanses us, and
carries off most of our waste and noxious matter. Block
one of these conduits; death follows very rapidly.
However, this drainage system is not quite perfect; our
pipes ‘fur’ like a kettle. Disease and accident apart, we
die of arterio-sclerosis caused by the gradual deposits
of insoluble salts which harden the arteries and destroy
the elasticity which enables them to adjust themselves to
new conditions. In fact, we ‘perish’ like india rubber.
Old age is simply a solidification of the tissues, all of
which become hard, dry and brittle.

As in philosophy, change is life, stagnation death;
we should not fear a brisk metabolism. Why should the
process which we call growth only a few years ago become
degeneration? For the same reason that a well-kept
well-oiled machine works more easily with age while a
rusty one wrecks itself. Exercise helps us to sluice our
sewers, but we must flush them well with water to
dissolve mineral waste. We must avoid the ingestion of
foods likely to leave insoluble deposits.

But there is another cause of decay, cause also in
part of this poisoning. Our organs would repair
themselves perfectly, if they were given sufficient rest.
In their haste they absorb the first material to hand, be
it good or bad. Also, we call on them to work before they
are fully rested and so wear them gradually out. Exercise
is necessary to keep us clean; but our rest must be
perfect restoration also. We can give the muscles this
benefit by Asana, and also reduce to a minimum the work
of heart and lungs. We can give our diges- tions rest by
eating only at noon and sunset, thus allowing them a
clear twelve hours of the twenty-four. Pranayama is the
ideal exercise as it promotes metabolism to the utmost
with the minimum of fatigue, and can be combined with
Asana.

The Hindus, to whom we owe these practices, realize
also (as I, above) that the solidity of the food is an
objection. They try to live on the Prana (subtle energy)
contained in it. For instance, they teach people to
reject their food before it has passed out of the
stomach. In the West, we have sought rather to discover
concentrations of good, and pre-digested prepara- tions
with a minimum of substance liable to form waste
insoluble or poisonous products. We thus endeavor to
diminish the work necessary to assimilation, as well as
to avoid dirt and disorder in our Temple. We even
eliminate on occasion the whole alimentary canal, and
feed our patients by direct injection into the blood, or
by absorbtion of nutriment in some convenient mucous
membrane.

But mankind—in temperate climes—does not ask
merely to exist; it demands joy; and joy, physiologically
speaking, consists in the expenditure of surplus energy.
Men living in the tropics need very little food since all
we require beyond the repair of tissues and supply of
mechanical force, is the heat required to keep our bodies
at 37o Centigrade, as above the temperature of the air.
If that be already 27o or so, we need but half of that
necessary if it be 17o, or one third if it be 7o. Yet men
in the tropics are not more energetic than our Scots and
Norsemen. Those like dolce far niente, repose, as these
take pleasure in activity. Even their phantasies attest
to it, the one inventing Nirvana as the other Valhalla.

We admire the frolics of the young horse turned out
to grass; we cultivate rough games, wild sports, and
athletics. The Struldbruggs of Swift are perhaps, to us,
of all his creations the most horrible. The immortality
we ask is neither idleness nor stagnation. We want
infinite Youth to squander, just as we wish a bottomless
purse not to hoard but to spend. We cannot rest, just as
the tropical peoples cannot work properly and
efficiently. By our theory they should live longer than
we do; but the same high temperature that favours them
befriends their enemies, bacteria; and they lack our
science of health.

Now all the means that we take to prolong life,
such as I have outlined above, have so far failed to
supply this superfluity of energy which we really desire.
People with diets and breathing exercises and the like
are usually walking sepulchres—some of them whited! The
animal who thinks about his health is already sick.
Absence of noise and friction is the witness of free
mechanical function. Fear actually creates disease, for
the mind begins to explore and so interferes with, the
unconscious rhythm of the body, as the Edinburgh Review
killed John Keats.

The man with the best chance of prolonged youth is
he who eats and drinks heartily, not much caring what;
who does things vigorously in the open air, with the
minimum of common-sense precautions; and who keeps his
mind at the same time thoroughly active, free from worry,
and his heart high. He has come, with William Blake, to
the Palace of Wisdom by the Road of Excess. He is on
friendly terms with Nature, and though he does not fear
her he heeds her, and does not provoke her. It is better
says he, to wear out than to rust out. True, but is there
need to wear out? He tires himself improperly, and he
digs his grave with his teeth.

It is this surplus of good food, this codocil to
our Will to Live, that makes us, like the Englishman on
the fine day, want to go out and kill something. And so
Death pays in some much Uric-Acid at his human
Savings-Bank.

There are only two solutions possible, the
invention of either a solvent more perfect than water, or
a super-Food. The first alternative is theoretically none
too probable. As to the second, if food were merely a
chemical and mechanical agent in us, the problem would be
one of diet. But there is some reason to believe that
food contains a substance yet unanalyzed and unweighed
which is of the nature of pure Energy. Live foods, like
oysters, stimulate inexplicable; foods long stored lose
their nutrive value, though the chemist and physicist can
detect no change. We need no psychical research but only
common sense and common experience to tell us that there
is a difference between a live thing and a dead one
beyond the detective powers of the laboratories of
Mid-Victorian arrogance and dogmatism.

A copper wire changes not in colour, weight, or
chemical composition when a current of electricity passes
through it; must we deny the existence of that force
whose nature is still perfectly mysterious despite our
knowledge of its properties, our measurements and our
control of it? Why then deny a Life- bearing force?
Ostensibly because ‘there is no evidence of it’; but
mainly because the hypothesis happened to be packed in
with the theological parcel of rubbish. But we have
nothing to span the gap between the two well-ascertained
groups of facts familiar to all; namely the facts of
‘matter’ and the facts of ‘mind’.

To our copper wire again! Electricity is matter of
a subtle and tenuous sort, in a peculiar state of motion;
so is my hypothetical Life-bearing force. The charged
copper wire does not wear out; why should the human body
do so, if only we could feed it with pure Life?

Nature everywhere is prolific of live things,
animal and vegetable. (Pray note that these things, and
only these avail to feed us.) What wealth of ‘spiritual’
force in and acorn! What history, its beginning veiled
beyond all search! What potentiality of future life, of
growth, of multiplication, beyond all conjecture! Like
us, it has the power of Life; it can take live things and
dead things into its own substance, bidding them, for its
own purposes, to live again, transfigured! There’s far
more energy in the acorn than in radium, at which fools
gape so wide in wonder. Far more, and far higher; radium
only degenerates and dissipates; the acorn lives!

But all that energy is latent and potential; the
acorn must be fed, like the fire that it is. (For every
growth is a chemical change, a kind of combustion,
element married to element with violence, with change of
state, with heat, light pleasure, pain, as its
by-products. Growth crowns itself with bloom or scent,
with flame or colour, with wisdom conscious or
unconscious.) The acorn cannot hoard its wealth or
experience, use its credit of possibility, except by
taking earth, air, and water into partnership, and
invoking on the Venture, the Benediction of the Sun. If
we destroy the fragile walls of its huge Library of
Wisdom, we do not otherwise than the Saracen at
Alexandria. The ages draw black hoods over their mighty
foreheads; they cover their inscrutable eyes; they
breathe no more upon us; their voice is Silence, Mystery,
Oblivion; and we are left orphan, exposed like Oedipus,
cheating croupier, Malice, has loaded with a curse. Where
is the treasured wisdom of that dead world? Where is the
Sphinx that hid in our crushed acorn? It was; it is not.
Love itself no more intangible, more fugitive, more
tragic, or more heedless. Its Fate? The oracles sneer;
the hieroglyphs are indecipherable; the black lamb is
found without a heart, and we must make our pilgrimage
perforce to the altar of the Unknown God. All we can say
is: It is not. Nay, but It was; and so, in some strange
form, must be; else were all science and all mathematics
falsehood and mockery.

But, as long since we learned, first to distinguish
rubbed from unrubbed amber, next to measure, last
control, though never yet to understand, the nature of,
the force that made that distinction; so we can tell the
living from the dead, can even measure life roughly, by
taking heed of its external shews and proofs; so we shall
come to control it, perhaps—nay, surely!—to create it.

We cannot yet direct the forces of the acorn, save
within narrowest limits; we can stop, thwart or foster,
even distort its growth; but we cannot lure it so far
from its path as to grow Elms from it. But that is due to
the definite bent and scope of the particular structure
of the physical basis of the Life-force which must be one
even as Electricity is one.

We shall be able to gather, if not to create, this
Life; to transmute it into other forms of force, as now
we transmute heat to light. We shall be able to store it,
to harness it, to guide it; to absorb its energy
ourselves directly, without resorting to our present
gross, inefficient, cumbrous and dangerous means of
abstracting it from ores (if I may say so) mechanically,
blindly, empirically, and with such toil and strife. Our
journey—by such means of transit—is necessary and
hateful; our travelling companions are our diseases, and
the host to ease us at the end of the short, the weary
day, is Death.

As we cannot drink at the source of Life, keep
Youth perpetual as we can keep Light—strange realization
of the Rosicrucian’s dream, or, it may be, discovery of
his secret!

But we have found the Super-food. We know a vehicle
of which a few grains can house enough pure light to fill
a man not only with nourishment, but with Energy almost
superhuman, and parallel, Intelligence incredibly
sun-bright for four-and twenty hours. That substance is
theoretically easy, but practically hard to obtain. In
England and America it would be impossible to procure any
quantity even of the raw material, at least in strength
and purity; much less to prepare it. We know how to
charge this substance with the Life-force. The process is
at present laborious and expensive; great skill is
required, and much precaution for errors in preparation
are hard to detect, and may result in hideous mischance.

It is now six years since we gained our knowledge.
They have been crowded with experiment; we are arrived at
the practical stage. We cannot understand the true Nature
of this force; we cannot measure it; we cannot create it,
or obtain it synthetically. But we can purify and
intensify it; we can, within wide limits, determine at
will the quality and scope of its action; we can postpone
death, increase energy, or prolong youth; and we are
justified in saying that we possess the Elixir of Life

666

Note: The Elixir is only administered to selected
individuals for good reason shown. The normal course of
treatment consists of two or three months’ preparation in
the place prepared for the purpose in Sicily, followed by
the necessary period, usually one month, of the actual
experiment which is made in the greatest secrecy.

Here at 5:50 a.m. (legal time) on
the
Day of Diana, being the 7th of June,
An XVI Sol in Gemini.

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